“The Game”
Written by Susan Sackett & Fred Bronson and Brannon Braga
Directed by Corey Allen
Season 5, Episode 6
Production episode 40275-206
Original air date: October 28, 1991
Stardate: 45208.2
Captain’s Log: Riker is vacationing on Risa, having invited a Ktarian woman named Etana back to his room. She gives him a headset, which she describes as a game that “everyone” is playing. It’s fairly simple: you put a disk into a cup that grows out of what looks like a checkerboard, but when Riker succeeds, he gets a brief feeling of euphoria. Etana encourages him to take it to Level 2—which is two disks and two cups, and presumably twice the euphoria…
Riker returns to the ship while it’s en route to the Phoenix Cluster. Their exploration of the cluster—which requires 15 new science teams to beam on board—has been cut from five weeks to two weeks, which requires a great deal of juggling on the part of Riker, La Forge, and the engineer the latter has promoted to mission specialist, Ensign Robin Lefler.
[“You gotta go with what works.”]